Lost 1967 - Steel auxiliary schooner yacht (a charter yacht by the 1960s)
Ramona began life as Ohonkara, a 109 ft steel schooner launched by the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company at Bristol, Rhode Island, in January 1920 for Carll Tucker of New York. Renamed Ramona by the late 1920s, she passed through a string of wealthy owners, served the US Navy as a coastal patrol vessel (IX-76) off California in 1942-43, appeared in the 1959 film A Summer Place, and was briefly renamed Lady Phyllis. In 1962 she took back the name Ramona, moved to Marigot Bay, St Lucia, and sailed under the British flag for a Bahamian company. A third mast was reportedly added in Nova Scotia.
By 1967 she was registered in the Bahamas as the Ramona C, owned by Vagabond Cruises Ltd. On 27 November 1967 she left Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for St Lucia with ten people aboard, under Captain William Ross Mackay (the spelling of his name varies; Berg's 'William Post McKay' is wrong). At about 8 p.m. on 2 December she struck the reefs near North Rock, some seven miles off the North Shore. Her flares brought no help, and the wreck was only spotted at 7.30 next morning by the St George's fisherman 'Speedy' Dickinson; boats and aircraft then joined the search, and the survivors were picked up by Musson Wainwright. Five people died - Dr Kenneth Ross MacIntyre, a Canadian doctor, and four young St Lucian crewmen, Joseph Modeste, Louis Desparest, Rene Hendrickson and Thomas Simon; four of them were buried in the Seafarers' Plot at St Paul's, Paget. A Marine Court of Inquiry found the master guilty of incompetence and of misconduct through excessive drinking, and cancelled his master's certificate, though he faced no criminal charges.
In February 1968 three Bermudians - John Chiappa, Stephen Dallas and Rudolph 'Silks' Richardson - bought the wreck, which had slid off into about 40 ft of water south-east of North Rock. Through the spring they worked with buoyancy bags, cofferdams and pumps, losing two of her three masts in storms, and on 1 July 1968 she was towed into Dockyard behind Chiappa's Wahoo and Richardson's Alrujo, having struck bottom five times and lost her bowsprit on the way. She did not go straight to the bottom again: she was dry-docked in August 1969, and in February 1971 the Royal Gazette reported her 'in the water at the Dockyard', with her owners hoping to make a small fortune from some 70 tons of lead in her keel. When and how she was finally sunk off Dockyard, where her bow came to rest inside the sunken Floating Dry Dock (see The Dry Dock), is not recorded in the Royal Gazette up to 1983; since the dock itself was sunk in August 1972, she presumably went down after that.
The Ramona lies with her bow inside the wreck of the Floating Dry Dock, which the Custodian of Historic Wrecks has classified as a restricted wreck under the Historic Wrecks Act 2001, so the site is not open to recreational divers. Berg (1991) describes the pair in about 60 ft off Dockyard.